


How To Be Dead

by Netgirl_y2k



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dead Ladies Club, F/F, One-Sided Ashara/Elia, Past Ashara/Brandon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27356713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Netgirl_y2k/pseuds/Netgirl_y2k
Summary: Lyanna Stark died after being abducted by Rhaegar Targaryen, her bones were lost to the Dornish sands.Lost in grief for her brother and child, Ashara Dayne threw herself from the highest tower of Starfall, her body was never recovered.Or,Lyanna and Ashara fake their deaths and run away to Essos.
Relationships: Ashara Dayne/Lyanna Stark
Comments: 26
Kudos: 82
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	How To Be Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lastwingedthing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastwingedthing/gifts).



_i. the tower of joy_

Lyanna Stark had been labouring, in blood and sweat, for days when the purple eyes swam into her blurry vision - Rhaegar’s eyes, only set in the face of lovely maiden with dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. 

She was not real, Lyanna’s fevered mind decided, she was a vision of what Lyanna’s daughter would look like when she was grown. She would be beautiful; she would be her mother’s doom. 

“She’s burning up.” The vision laid a cool palm on Lyanna’s forehead. “She needs a midwife.”

“Rhaegar said-”

“Seven Hells, Arthur! If we don’t get her help _she’s going to die._ ” 

“Fine, Ash.” There was heavy, defeated sigh from somewhere Lyanna couldn’t see. “Take her. I’ll have Ser Oswell make ready a litter.”

Lyanna could barely raise her arm but she managed to clutch the vision’s hand and exhale, “Thank you.”

The vision squeezed her hand in a grip so tight that Lyanna felt the bones shift, and she thought that somewhere underneath the all-encompassing pain that was ripping her in two it probably hurt.

_ii. starfall_

Ashara had climbed to the top of Palestone Sword Tower, the rapids of the Torrentine a dizzying deluge far below, and there she’d wept and wept and wept. She’d cried for Arthur, dead for the honor of a prince who was already lost, and for Princess Elia and her sweet, innocent babes. And for her own lost babe.

Then she dried her eyes, descended the stairs, and sought out Lord Stark who was on one of Starfall’s balconies looking out over the Dornish sands, his nephew in a basket by his side. 

“Lyanna refuses to name the boy,” said Eddard Stark. 

Lady Lyanna wouldn’t hold the child, nor feed him. Until Lord Stark had arrived with his grim news and Arthur’s sword the babe had been in the sole care of Wylla, the midwife who’d worked miracles to save Lyanna’s life. “Rhaegar had chosen the name Visenya. He was so sure that he was fathering Aegon and his sisters come again, though I’m not sure the boy would thank you for that name.” Ashara laughed darkly. It wasn’t really funny, but...

“Jon,” said Lord Stark with a firm nod. “Jon is a good name.”

It was, at least, not a Targaryen name. “I lost a child,” Ashara said, very quickly. 

Lord Stark’s eyes darted down then up, and Ashara self-consciously laid her palm over her flat belly. “Brandon-”

“Was always betrothed to another, is long dead, and the child was such a small, fleeting thing.” Brandon Stark was but a distant memory now. Ashara realised that of all the tears she’d shed, not one of them had been for Brandon. “But that was why I was summoned to the the Tower of Joy when your sister was taken to childbed.”

Lord Stark frowned. “Because you’d lost a child?”

“Everyone knew that I had been dismissed from court because I was with child, but by the time I lost her I was at home in Dorne and Arthur had the loss kept secret.”

“Your brother was trying to protect your honour,” said Lord Stark, his mouth twisting, the irony of defending the honour of the man he’d killed not lost on him. 

Ashara’s mouth twitched in an echo of a smile. “That ship had long since sailed. No, he and Rhaegar thought that Lyanna’s child might have to be hidden, especially if she took after her father.” It was the eyes, the lilac-purple-violet eyes, rare in Westeros, but common to the point of cliche in the Targaryens, and not unheard of in the Daynes. “They came up with a ploy where the babe could be hidden in plain sight at Starfall, passed off as my natural child, until-” Ashara laughed, again at something that was not funny “-until the rebellion was crushed.”

“He looks nothing like Rhaegar,” Lord Stark spoke with some satisfaction.

He looked like his mother, and his mother’s brothers. Ashara would not have to change the story overmuch. “I could still-”

“No,” said Lord Stark. “If it is the boy’s fate to be raised in a lie as a bastard then I will at least see to it that he is raised at Winterfell by his blood.” 

Ashara wished that she was not quite so relieved. The boy - Jon Snow, now - was a sweet babe, and the circumstances of his birth were not his fault, but gods, the _cost_ at which he had he been brought into the world. “Is it,” she asked, curious, “his fate?”

“Lyanna refuses to return to Robert, if I force her she will provoke him somehow, and the boy’s lineage could never be kept hidden.” Lord Stark rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. “And now I have to decide which of my men I needs must ask to give up his family, his name, and everything he’s ever known to go into hiding with Lyanna.”

“Don’t.” Ashara looked across the sands to where they met the sky in a blur of heat distortion, listened to the distant crash of the waves, thought of Arthur, and of Elia. “There is nothing left for me here. I will go with her.” 

_iii. the crossing_

Lyanna was greensick. Everything between her legs was a red knot of hurt, her teats ached with useless milk, and every roll of the deck caused her stomach to lurch and her mouth to fill with bile. And yet, and yet, she was free.

The door to the cabin opened just far enough to admit a gust of foul smelling sea air that made Lyanna groan and hunch over her knees, and a woman, hooded and cloaked. She pushed her hood back - Rhaegar’s eyes in a lovely face, long dark hair escaping its windswept knot, elegant hands that were stronger than they looked. Ashara Dayne, Lyanna’s companion in exile.

“I don’t know how you don’t hate me.” Lyanna knew she sounded self-pitying, but she could not help thinking of all those dead because of her poor choices. Father, Brandon, all those Northern boys who’d marched to war in her name, Princess Elia, those _poor children._ Rhaegar and the men who’d followed him to their doom, including Arthur Dayne.

Ashara sat next to Lyanna on her bunk, laying her palm gently between Lyanna’s shoulder blades. “If I hated you would I not have left you to die in that cursed tower?”

“I don’t know why you didn’t.”

“I just...could never.”

“My brother - Benjen, my baby brother - would say that since you saved my life you’re stuck with me until I can find a way to repay you.” In the dim of the cabin Lyanna couldn’t see Ashara’s face in detail, but she thought that she could make out the hint of a smile. 

“We’ve been at sea for two days now,” said Ashara.

Lyanna groaned. Two days. How could that possibly be all? “It feels like weeks.”

Ashara rubbed soothing circles against Lyanna’s back. “My sister will have told everyone that she saw me jump from the tallest tower in Starfall, and your brother should have sent word that you could not be saved.” Ashara cleared her throat, paused, and said, “Allyria is a born liar, but Lord Stark did not seem to me to be a man comfortable with untruths.”

“No.” Ned had always told the truth, even when they were children at Winterfell and Brandon and Lyanna had been habitual fibbers, but he’d make himself a liar because Lyanna had begged, pleaded, and ultimately threatened to harm herself if he made her go back to Robert. And he’d do it to protect the babe. “My brother is very noble. He knows it’s the only way to protect the boy. I told Ned that’s why I had to leave, to keep him safe. I don’t think he believed me though, I think he suspected the truth.”

“What truth?” Ashara asked.

“That I never wanted him.” There was an aching hollow in Lyanna chest where her son should be, it was dwarfed only by the immense relief that he was far away, and that nobody could force her to be a mother to him. “That I didn't want any of them.” 

“Any of them?”

“At Harrenhal-” in the gloom Ashara’s eyes didn’t look so much like Rhaegar’s, Lyanna noticed “-at Harrenhal Robert was bragging about how quickly he was going to get me with child after the wedding, and how I was going to give him ten children.” Lyanna had seen the rest of her life spread out before her: pregnancy after pregnancy with no respite, until she died from it, and Robert claimed it as _his_ tragedy. “I didn’t want any of it, but I had no way out - until Rhaegar.”

Ashara’s hand on Lyanna’s back stilled. “Rhaegar didn’t tell you he wanted a child from you?”

“Not at first.” At first he’d been full of praise for Lyanna’s deeds as the knight of the laughing tree; he’d compared her to Barristan the Bold, and to the first Visenya. “And then when he did it seemed like so small a price; do it once in exchange for never having to do it again. He said I wouldn't have to marry Robert, or anyone that I didn’t choose.” Now that Lyanna had said it out loud it all sounded so naïve. “I was so stupid.” 

Ashara didn’t say anything, but she wrapped her arm around Lyanna’s shoulders and pulled her close; Lyanna lay her head on her shoulder. Ashara Dayne was a virtual stranger to her still, but it was already easier to find comfort in her arms that it had been in Robert’s crushing embrace or Rhaegar’s perfunctory one.

_iv. the motherhouse_

Ashara had never been a woman of much faith and she was too fond of the pleasures of the flesh, but right now, as she made her way through the dusty streets of Pentos, she thought that the main argument against taking religious vows was that a septa’s robes were heavy and hot and awkward to wear.

She tugged the too tight collar of her robes away from her throat just as someone stepped out behind her and covered her eyes. “Guess who?”

Ashara rolled her eyes. “Lyanna Stark, latterly of Winterfell.” And currently of rented lodgings in the house of an only halfway respectable Pentoshi widow.

Lyanna tugged Ashara into a quick hug, then held her at arm’s length, an easy smile on her face. Honestly, sometimes Ashara still found it difficult to reconcile the dying girl from the Tower of Joy, or the symbol that seven kingdoms had gone to war over, with this laughing woman in the carelessly dust-stained dress, a glint in her grey eyes. 

They had sailed from Starfall to Volantis and made their way northwards through the Free Cities - in Myr they had gotten word that King Robert of Westeros had taken a queen in Cersei Lannister, and Lyanna had laughed and _laughed_ \- in Pentos the gold that Ashara had been able to take from Starfall and what little Ned Stark had on hand to give them ran out. 

During their journey through Essos Ashara Dayne had become many different people - Septa Lemore was a new one. 

“How are things in the motherhouse?” Ashara’s face must have betrayed her feelings because Lyanna wrinkled her nose in sympathy. Lyanna Stark would have taken to the religious life like a duck to jousting, so it was probably for the best that her first attempt at passing herself off as a septa had been so painfully unconvincing that they hadn’t even bothered to try it on the house mother. “I spoke to a merchant who can arrange our passage to Braavos,” said Lyanna, “providing we can pay.” 

That was why Ashara had been posing as one of the faithful; the Seven were a niche church on this side of the Narrow Sea - there was only one motherhouse in all of Pentos - but the sisters were literate and considered trustworthy and thus often hired out as teachers and scribes. A sister could earn a wage that was but a dream to any woman unwilling to earn a living on her back. 

“We can pay,” said Ashara, who’d been counting their coppers.

“Then,” said Lyanna with a winning smile, “you no longer have to worry about offending the house mother and and can spend the evening in the city with me. Sylvie was telling me about this troop of mummers who are performing in the market square every night this week.”

It had been a long time since Ashara had seen any street theatre, probably not since Sunspear in the days before Elia’s marriage. In place of an answer she cast aside the headpiece that was meant to cover her hair and shook her out her dark curls.

Lyanna’s grin widened and clutched Ashara’s hand. “Brilliant!”

Ashara didn’t know why she had been expecting a bawdy comedy, but the play staged was a tragedy about the pains of unrequited love; out of the corner of her eye she saw Lyanna use the shoulder of her dress to dash away the tears rolling down her cheek. It was something she found fascinating about Lyanna, that the girl who had made a cold-blooded deal to become a princes’s mistress for a year in exchange for having her engagement broken off could be such an unabashed romantic. 

“It must be such a terrible thing,” said Lyanna, in the twilight after the play, “to love someone who doesn’t love you back.”

Unrequited love seemed to have been behind many of the Seven Kingdoms’ recent ills. Robert had loved Lyanna, Elia had loved Rhaegar, Ashara had loved- “It is,” she said plainly 

Lyanna regarded Ashara with what she clearly took to be a shrewd look. “Brandon.”

Ashara snorted, and almost held her peace, except that there was no one left alive that the truth could hurt, and it would not do for Lyanna to think that Ashara was carrying a torch for her brother. “Elia had not long discovered that she was pregnant again, and she was _so happy_ to be giving Rhaegar another child. She talked about it endlessly, how a son would bring them together as a family. I suppose I thought that seducing someone else at Harrenhal might get her attention, or make her jealous. I doubt she even noticed, not-” Ashara felt moved to defend her lost princess “-out of cruelty, she was never that, she just didn’t know how I felt.”

Lyanna exhaled and took Ashara’s hand, threading their fingers together. “You loved Princess Elia.” 

“Yes. Very much.” Ashara took a deep breath, forced some lightness into her tone, and said, “In case you think I was taking advantage of your brother, I can assure you that Brandon was a willing participant in everything that happened.”

Lyanna snorted, and made a point of looking Ashara up and down. “Look at you!” Her laugh was merry but Ashara could hear her underlying grief for her family. “I bet Brandon was rather more than willing!”

At the time Brandon Stark had seemed like a safe choice: willing, marrying someone else, and afterwards returning to his home a long, long way away. “We both knew nothing could come of it, but then-” Ashara felt the ghostly pang in her heart and her womb.

Lyanna squeezed Ashara’s hand. “-something came of it.”

“Very briefly,” Ashara smiled softly, “and none of us can live in the past forever.”

“No.” Lyanna cast a furtive glance around the empty street and tugged Ashara into the shadows of a doorway. “I’ve been thinking about that line from the play-” she cupped Ashara’s cheek, and twirled a lock of dark hair around the finger of her other hand “-about how you should look at what’s right in front of you.” 

“I am,” breathed Ashara, licking her lips; she hadn’t realised how true it was until she said it. “I have been.”

Lyanna closed the distance and kissed her. Ashara closed her eyes and lost herself in the kiss, pulling Lyanna close with one hand on her hip and the other at the small of her back. When she pulled back she learned something else interesting about Lyanna Stark: she kissed with her eyes open.

Lyanna blinked and asked, “What if it had been me?”Ashara nipped at the skin of Lyanna’s throat and pretended she hadn’t heard the question. “At Harrenhal. When you were picking a Stark to seduce-” which struck Ashara as a very mercenary way of looking at it “-what if it been me?”

In truth, occupied as Ashara had been with brooding over Elia and dallying with Brandon, she had barely noticed Lyanna. Her overwhelming reaction when Rhaegar had absconded with her and cast the realm into chaos had been _who?_ Ashara pulled back and regarded Lyanna, she tucked a lock of the northwoman’s hair behind her ear and said, “I think our lives would have been very different.”

“I don’t know,” said Lyanna thoughtfully. “Maybe we still would have ended up on the run together, stealing kisses in a strange city-” she laughed then “-and maybe you still would have been dressed as a nun.”

_v. the house with the yellow door_

It was, for once, not the lash of rain that woke Lyanna.

Braavos had many things to recommend it for those in pursuit of a new life: Lyanna and Ashara had been able to live anonymously and as they pleased, no one had questioned their household arrangements, the Iron Bank and the signed letter that allowed Ashara access to the accounts of House Dayne meant that they were in no danger of running short of funds, and no one had questioned Lyanna’s water dancing lessons, nor what she’d chosen to do with those skills once she’d attained a certain level of mastery. 

But the weather, the weather was godawful. 

Lyanna burrowed under the bedclothes, seeking respite from the morning chill off the sea, and bumped up against her paramour. 

Lyanna had long loved the word _paramour_ , ever since Ash had first whispered it to her in a narrow septa’s cell in Pentos, her lips tracing the shell of Lyanna’s ear; she certainly preferred it to the word _mistress_ which was what she had been to Rhaegar, and one of the least objectionable of the names the house mother in Pentos had called her just before she and Ash had been compelled to flee the city with all haste. 

Ashara Dayne yawned, blinked sleepy purple eyes, and said, “Morning.”

“Good morning.” 

Ash’s mouth sought out Lyanna’s, and Lyanna pressed her back into the mattress, stopping only to make sure the covers were tucked in tight around them, before rolling on top of her. Lyanna mouthed down Ash’s throat, and Ash tugged at Lyanna’s nightclothes. And then, of course, the titan roared, the city wide call for Braavosi to rise and begin the day. 

Lyanna groaned and buried her face in Ash’s hair. “I should get up. I’m working today.” Bodyguard to a visiting foreign lady, who was in no real danger while she shopped, but liked the idea of being guarded by a lady duellist. 

Ash trailed her hand regretfully down Lyanna’s side, and Lyanna squirmed, aroused and ticklish. “ I should show my face at court too.” Under a false name, Ashara Dayne was now a minor courtier of the Sea Lord’s court. 

After they rose, grumbling at the morning chill, and washed, Ashara donned a dress of light purple which befitted her station. It suited her, bringing out the colour in her eyes. Ash’s unusual eyes had never been Lyanna’s favourite of her paramour’s features though, that had always been the loose curls of her long, dark hair, something that hadn’t changed even after Ash spent several weeks sulking after finding her first silver hair earlier this year.

Lyanna dressed in the garish, clashing colours of a bravo, fastened her needle-thin sword at her hip, and donned her feathered hat. In Braavos carrying a blade opened you up to being challenged to prove your skill, but ever since Lyanna had won this house, with its peeling yellow door, in a duel her reputation had spoken for itself. It didn’t matter that her opponent had been well past his prime, drunk, and hadn’t expected a girl duellist to have any skill at all, in Braavos, as in Westeros, it was the story that counted. 

Ash was seated in front of a mirror fastening earrings to her lobes, she met Lyanna’s reflected gaze. “You seem-” she began carefully “-happier.”

Lyanna knew she’d been moody and melancholy, she always was at this time of year. It was the anniversary of her learning that Father and Brandon were gone, it was when she’d learned just how ill-served she’d been in her deal with Rhaegar...and it was the boy’s nameday, too.

Lyanna touched the hilt of her sword. He’d be ten now, her son, and wonderful, dutiful Ned would have seen to it that he was taught the rudiments of swordplay. Hack-and-slash rather than the water dancing that his mother knew, but it was with sword in hand that Lyanna occasionally felt a strange sort of connection to her far-away son.

Ash could be haunted at times too. Lyanna would catch her examining the silvery stretch marks on her stomach in the mirror, and every argument they had wasn’t really about Lyanna endangering herself by duelling or about the household finances, but about the fact that Lyanna had a living child that she’d chosen to flee from. 

But mostly, they were happy and without regrets.

Lyanna adjusted her feathered hat to a jaunty angle, placed her hands on Ash’s shoulders and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. “We should do something to celebrate,” she said, “after all, it is the ten year anniversary of our elopement.”


End file.
